UNDERSTATEMENT AND OVERSTATEMENT IN MEDIA COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS COVID 19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

People's knowledge and beliefs about the world are shaped by what they see and read in the media. However, reporters may change the facts to support a certain point of view or to make a story more interesting, which can lead to biassed or even false reports. This study aims at investigating the way that news agencies and writers maximize and minimize the danger of Coronavirus COVID 19 through two linguistic strategies: overstatement and understatement. The main concern of this study is to tackle the role of overstatement and understatement in ten news articles about Coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic taken from CNN news agency and Fox news agency, five from each. Accordingly, this study concerns itself to answer following question: (1) Which of these two linguistic strategies the news articles about Coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic exploit more ? (2) Which linguistic and rhetorical devices news agencies and writers employ more in implementing each of these two strategies? To answer the aforementioned question, the following procedures are followed: (1) surveying the relevant literature on overstatement and understatement and their linguistic and rhetorical devices. (2) analyzing the use overstatement and understatement in the selected news articles according to a model developed by this study. The results show that all reporters of the selected data of the two news agencies employ devices of both understatement and overstatement to report the related news.